Fastest 40: The Speediest Cars From Every Brand Sold Stateside

Have you ever wondered what the fastest model of vehicle is from each brand? We did, and we assumed you were curious, too, or you probably wouldn’t be here. We’ve covered all kinds of “fastest” lists — luxury cars, electric cars, motorcycles, cars costing less than $30,000, and so on — but here, we present a near-comprehensive list of the fastest factory vehicles available from 40 brands doing business in the United States.

The findings were not all that surprising. Luxury brands make faster and more powerful cars, for the most part. Companies like Toyota and Honda seem to have forfeited their pursuit of speed for cars of a more practical nature. Others have been dead set on producing the fastest cars possible.

For the sake of this list, we excluded ultra-low-volume vehicles like Lamborghini’s Veneno, which only has three models on the road, but some lower-volume vehicles in the hundreds were included, modified or tuned vehicles (sorry, Hennessey), or vehicles no longer in production like the Ram SRT10 or Mazda’s excellent MazdaSpeed3. Vehicles on this list must be available in the United States, either now or in the near future.

Concept cars were also left out for the sake of a fair fight — and, you know, because they’re not available. We covered major brands that do a fair amount of business in America and offer more than one vehicle (so companies like Bugatti were also excluded, since it only is producing 450 units of the Veyron, although we made an exception for Tesla). Discontinued lines — here’s looking at you, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, and Hummer — were also left off the list.

Here are the fastest production cars representing the quickest models off the factory floor from their respective brands. Since in many cases the horsepower figures for different models were quite close or the same, 0-60 times and top speeds were also taken into account; also, the most powerful vehicle in the lineup may not be the fastest. The following are ranked alphabetically.